Humanities II

This is a global history course aimed at tenth-grade students that provides a cohesive approach to learning and understanding the history of the world. In this course, you and your students will explore the transformations that created our modern world, beginning in the long nineteenth century and ending in our present moment. This course will help students learn how to use stories about our connected human past to orient themselves to their present moment and prepare for the future. We’re going to cover a lot of ground (and almost 300 years), but this course is not a typical march-through-time history class that covers one thing after another. Because this is a humanities class we will also be integrating our English 10 curriculum as well which includes a variety of authors from various time periods. Classic and contemporary authors represented in the grade 10 modules include Christopher Marlowe, Amy Tan, Martin Luther King, Jr., Alice Walker, Malala Yousafzai, E.B. White, William Shakespeare, and Niccolò Machiavelli. Working with these texts, students build knowledge, analyze ideas, delineate arguments and develop writing, collaboration, and communication skills.

Course Learning Outcomes

WHP Course Objectives

  1. Understand that history is a narrative, or a combination of narratives, shaped by the sources and perspectives you use to tell that story.

  2. Apply the evidence from sources using multiple perspectives and scales to evaluate (support, extend, or challenge) different narratives.

  3. Engage in a meaningful historical inquiry by analyzing primary and secondary sources from multiple perspectives of gender, race, and socioeconomic status, or other hierarchies to gain a deeper understanding of human history.

  4. Analyze the narrative of history using the course’s three frames: communities, networks, and production and distribution.

  5. Use historical thinking skills and reasoning practices such as scale, comparison, causation, continuity and change over time, sourcing, claim testing, and contextualization to understand and evaluate the historical narrative.

  6. Create and support arguments using historical evidence to communicate conclusions through individual or shared writing.

English 10

  1. Conduct close readings for textual details and engage in productive evidence-based discussions about the text.

  2. Collect and organize evidence from texts to support analysis in writing.

  3. Analyze the text using specific textual evidence.

  4. Interpret figurative language to uncover the connotative meaning of a text.

  5. Trace the development of ideas over the course of the text.

  6. Write informative texts to convey complex ideas